I Read Books: Bold As Love
Gwyneth Jones begins her rock-and-roll future science-fantasy re-telling/riff-off King Arthur. It’s Dissolution Summer, and Scotland and Wales are going to split from England at the end of the year*. The Counterculture is on the march, with hardcore environmentalists and armed hippie dropouts threatening to overrun everything. The Home Secretary tries to cut this off with a Counterculture Think Tank of rock stars.
When the non-executive head of state retires, the Home Secretary’s candidate for a funky green president is Pigsty Liver, a nasty yet charismatic rocker, but it turns out he has his own ideas. In a bloody coup at a concert to celebrate, he kills the counterculture leaders then cements his position by taking credit for the Deconstruction Tour, an orgy of violence directed at anti-green targets.
This is the brainchild of Ax Preston, utopian guitarist, the man with a plan to save the world, or at least the country maybe, from the overlapping disasters confronting them – ecological destruction, flood, rioting, lack of energy, Islamic secessionists, a refugee fleet. And if we can get through today’s disaster maybe we can get through tomorrow’s and at the end there might be a country worth living in.
This is the structure of the novel, a disaster occurs and our characters have to deal with it, and while it’s still simmering another comes along. But that’s not really what they’re interested in; they’re rock and roll stars who want to perform and make music and maybe sort out their personal lives between Ax, Sage Pender (king of the lads, immix code wizard) and Fiorinda (teenage rock princess). And the supporting cast as well? Maybe they’ll get something done.
Read This: For a grim, uplifting, glorious invocation of near-future neo-sixties rock and roll disaster
Don’t Read This: If all this talk of music and apocalypse/utopia mixed together, along with weird and unsettling personal histories sounds unpleasant
* It gets delayed, but eventually happens
Bold As Love is the name of a Hendrix song the title track of the Axis: Bold As Love album.
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